Carl: Hello and welcome to the SaaS Growth Podcast. This week we're here with Alex Hillman, the founder of Indiehall and one of the brains behind 30x500, a course for people looking to make products that sell. How are you today, Alex?

Alex: I'm doing great. It is stormy and rainy and gray here in Philadelphia, but a lot of good stuff going on and I'm excited for a conversation with you. Sure.

Carl: you. Thank you so much for being here. So let's start, I'll start how I always start these. So tell me a little bit about 30x500 and how it came to be.

Alex: We have to go back in some internet history in order to tell that story. And really dates back to the late 2000s where in a lot of ways, the SAS industry was being born depending on who's telling the story and who wants to be the star a lot of folks credit folks, like 37 signals for really pioneering that arena.

And I wasn't building software. As a service, but as a freelancer who is interested in building things on the Internet, I was really intrigued by this movement of people coming up with new models to be creative and make a living from it. And in parallel to that. A woman by the name of Amy boy, who eventually became friends with and business partners with was studying that sort of space as well.

And as a student of psychology and communication and writing and business, she was fascinated by this entire idea of being able to. Create something, put it on the Internet and not only sell it, but have recurring revenue come from it and started thinking about, what she might create and as she would tell the story.

A lot of her early ideas were the same kinds of ideas that many other people come up with. And in fact, one of the earliest things was looking at 37 signals, famed base camp and it was project management software for those who are uninitiated in that world. Looking at it and going, this is making zillions of dollars.

And it's actually not very good from a software design perspective. And she's like a deep study in human computer interaction and usability. And she's this has a lot of flaws. I can do better. And think about that for a second. I can do better than 37 signals in the, like the peak of that era is is a thought that one can have, but she channeled that and said you know what?

Eventually I need to make my own thing. And she had launched a SAS called then called Freckle now called Noko N O K O. And a business time tracking tool for fellow freelancers and consultants, like her and her husband, who were all complaining about how time tracking software all sucked.

And they said maybe we can actually make something that's better. Cause everybody seems to hate what's on the market and that software they built it in basically a one day a week kind of thing on the side of their consulting business and launched to paying customers. And when they made that news public on, again, early internet Twitter days people are like, Whoa you built software and people paid you on day one, I'm over here building stuff and nobody's buying.

What did you do? How did you do this? And so Amy put together a conference call, not a zoom call, an old school dial up into a phone line and said, if you pay, you'll get it. 99 you can, I'm going to run through what I did, how I did it, what decisions I made and what I would do differently about everything we did up until launch day so that we had paying customers on launch day.

And it was a three hour call. And at the end, those folks said, this is more useful than all the startup blogs that are out there. Please tell me you're going to do more of this. And so that's when she and I, who were friends at the time sat down and said, why is this stuff that. She did with software and I did with my business, which is not actually software.

It is a membership organization called Indy hall. We're the, one of the first coworking communities here in the states. The, what are we doing differently? That is obvious to us, but not obvious to them. And we sat down and built the very very first version of an actual curriculum for everything that you would need to not only know, but actually do.

And in what order we thought you should do it so that you too could have customers. For whatever you built on launch day. And that's really the very first version was that, that conference call in a lot of ways. But the first version where it was actually a course with some learning design, with some actions for you to take with some techniques that we developed, we reverse engineered some of the things that we did by gut instinct or because we learned them somewhere else, we turned them into a thing that you can actually try and do and practice and get better at and.

Everyone who signed up for that, gave us great feedback. And that was in 2000 and nine that we, we launched that first course. It now being 2024, we've been teaching four 15 years iterations and evolutions of that material. Learning from what people do, learning from what people don't do and constantly improving the way that we teach.

Ultimately, the same fundamentals, which is wild to think that, 15 years of the internet, so much has changed, but the thing that really hasn't changed is why people buy human psychology, and that's really at the root of everything that we teach.

Carl: What would you say is the, like the crux of 3D by 500 and why it works and why people buy when they follow your process?

Alex: I think there's two pieces to that answer. One is hidden in our very weird name. If we can start with one piece of advice is don't name your product, a math equation. It's a bad move. We have some brand recognition at this point, but people will call it everything other than what it is 50 by 300 and so on and so forth.

And the name comes from the first thing we realized, which is people see a big goal. Like replacing their salary and they don't sit down and break it down into the smaller parts. It would take to achieve that goal. And so in our case, we looked around and said, okay, a bunch of our Bay Area software engineering friends are making a meager 300, 000 a year.

There's 200 and no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, I'll back up a bunch of our software Bay Area software friends are making 180, 000 a year. And that was the salary they were trying to replace. And, whether you're raising funds or selling products or somewhere in between, that's a big number.

And we would turn around and say if you can create 30 a month worth of value for just 500 people on the entire internet, that's 180, 000 a year gross. And people's. Like eyes went big and wide, like we had just given them a very complicated equation and obviously it's not. And so we named it that with the suggestion that whether it's a, 30 people or 500 people in 30 a month or 30 people being 500 a month.

Those are both very achievable numbers on the internet, full of gazillions of people. And if you do a bunch of the other things right, you can stack the deck in your favor. So that's part one. Part two is how do you stack the deck in your favor? And this is where we start getting into some of our actual in house techniques and strategies.

The first of which being relentless focus on the customer and so much of the business and the business world and startup world in particular is so focused on the idea, is it a good idea, product market fit, all of these other things. And there are all things that you can only really say, like for sure, once, once they hit.

Is a good as an idea, good or bad? I don't know. Is anybody buying it? What I think doesn't matter, even if I'm the customer, because I'm only one customer and not a lot of successful businesses are built on a single customer. And if we talk about product market fit, it's how do you know you've got it until you got it?

So it's like a post hoc association. So all of these like very popular quote unquote tried and true techniques, like lean are basically boiled down to do stuff for a while. And when it, and iterate as fast as you can, but what we know and what we see is people take that advice to heart.

And they burn themselves out doing a bunch of things that don't work because they're fundamentally flawed and most common fundamental flaw is they do not have a fundamental understanding of who they're building for. In the first place, they pick an idea that could be useful to lots of people or to nobody in particular.

Scratch their own itch, whatever it might be, and 3500 starts. We may be one of the few business courses that starts with the customer first. And I'll go one step further. Some places will say, to make make a list of ideal customers, ideal customer personas. We don't even do that. We say, who are you actually best suited to sell to because of your built-in advantages, whether that is knowledge, relationships, connections, insights communities.

You're a part of, whatever it is, and it helps you start not just by picking a customer, which is the thing most people. Fail to do the begin with, but picking a customer that's actually aligned with you. So it was an inversion of the whole product market fit, which some people have adapted into founder market fit or founder customer fit.

We start with that and say, let's pick a customer that you're actually really well suited to create things for that. You can actually earn their trust that you can actually use some built in advantages to learn them, understand them and translate what you know about them into good. Products to create for them.

And then the last piece that is really at the heart of 30 by 500 is in some ways, I don't want to say it's the most important cause the customer is always the most important. But the thing that people find most valuable is a technique called sales Safari and sales Safari is. Effectively a customer research technique that breaks all of the paradigms of customer interviews and validation where you have to go out and convince people to give up time in their day to talk to you and tell the truth.

And it's not to say that people are out here lying, but A, people are busy. B, they don't want to hurt your feelings. And whether they're a friend or a stranger, even if they're not trying to deceive you, they're not necessarily a reliable narrator of their own life experiences. And that's a touchy thing to say sometimes because people say my lived experience is my lived experience.

And that's absolutely true. But the way people describe their lived experience when they're being interviewed is often different from how they describe that lived experience while they're experiencing it. Or when they're not under the light, magnifying glass of someone who's trying to create something and sell it to them at the very least.

And so sales Safari takes a tried and true research technique called ethnography. We did not create that is from the world of observational sciences. And the reason it's called Safari is it's the, if you think of the opposite of a Safari, it's going to the zoo. And if you go to the zoo, you're going to see the animals, but are those animals actually behaving the way they normally behave in the wild? Largely no, right? They're well fed. They're in even the nicest place. Enclosures are still cages, right? Those are not the same thing as wild animals on so far. You get to go to their turf. You can see how they behave when they do not know they are being watched, right? In the best of scenarios. And so we take the ethnographic approach, which is going into the environments where your People that you were best suited to create for already are where they're talking amongst each other, where they go for trusted information, what questions they're asking, what problems they're having, how they describe those problems.

What things get recommended amongst those communities, and it is a lot more nuanced and in depth than you could ever get out of survey data because it's these little bits and pieces that people tell on themselves. And a lot of that happens on the internet, whether it's on forums or chat boards or man, do I sound like an internet old when I say chat boards?

Carl: IRC chats, yeah.

Alex: Yeah, these days it's Discord and Slack, but it could be anywhere people are gathering and having conversations on the Internet. We teach Safari as a structured way to observe and, more specifically, take notes. Because a really interesting thing that we learned early on is that people who are students, who are typically highly educated, like people that went to college and, got degrees, forgot or never knew how to take notes in the first place.

And so we'd say, Hey, go to this place and look at what people are talking about, and then take notes. And people would come back and they'd say, I really didn't see much. And I'd say, really, what did you see? Is that a bunch of people complaining? And I go. No, that's it. That's the whole thing. You found gold and just, they were not tuned to look at that as anything other than people whining and bitching on the internet.

And then we'd say here's some examples like, oh that's really cool. It's all right go do it again. And then come back and they say, I saw some more stuff. What did you see? And they'd come back with these vague general observations. And I'm like I'm looking for specifics, like what terms did they use?

How did they describe that problem? Was it. Like what, to what degree was it painful? Was it hair on fire or just annoying? Was it stopping their day or holding them back in some way? Was it making them feel dumb or bad at their job? Like those kinds of things. And I'm like, I don't, I wasn't, I don't really know.

I was like did you take any notes? And no. And I'm like, all right, now we've got to teach people how to take notes. And I don't say all this to be condescending. It was stuff that we had to learn as teachers and say, Oh, we're not just teaching people, Hey, you should go study people on the internet.

That's where we started. But through watching our students apply. But also not really the techniques that we were asking them to do we realized, Oh, there's a bunch of things that we want to system ties and show them not only how to do, but I think a really big thing we learned in the early 2010s was from one of our friends and mentors, Kathy Sierra, who created the headfirst programming.

Books for O'Reilly back in the day and revolutionized the way programming was taught through books at that period. And one of the ideas from Kathy that we learned really early on is the importance of practice and good practice. Deliberate practice is the term that she used. And so 3500 is.

It's very different. A lot of, courses and workshops, you sit back and, it's the Netflix thing. I'm going to absorb this information and make me feel smarter and maybe give me some fresh ideas. And we've got some of that, but it's really built to get you into action. And the action is all deliberate practice.

It's do this in this way. You're going to suck at it at the very beginning. Expectation set. It's gonna feel weird and awkward and you're not gonna be happy with the results. But if you do it five times, you'll be a little better. You do it 10 times, you'll be a little better than that. You do it 50 times and you'll go, wow, this thing actually works.

And there's a little bit of trust the process in that, but the biggest piece is figuring out what can we give people to do to try and then to bring Once they've practiced it safely in, in a test environment to an audience of their own, to a community of their own without feeling concerned about doing it wrong, doing it badly and that creating some element of risk or failure.

Carl: Just to loop back on Salesforce for a little bit because I've done the 3D by 500 course and I've seen all, everything you've created. And I just want to highlight like, It is, it's amazing seeing people work in these you've termed a watering hole, but basically they're the natural environment sort of communicating.

And you're completely right that it's so much more valuable than normal customer interviews, because I have friends who do the customer interview thing, and I've done the self surprise side of things. And especially the ideas of recommendations and getting, and seeing what people actually share is huge information that you don't, normally get in cultural interviews and everyone I talk to is oh we, a lot of our success came from word of mouth, but you don't get that unless.

You are one of those products people recommend. And so being able to capture that information in the audience is huge. Yeah,

Alex: One of the things that people often, hear about that and push back and go my audience isn't really online like that. And one, I would suggest, that there's a reason that one of our criteria for audience selection is that they gather online and two, it's not that you couldn't sell to an audience that doesn't gather online, it's that it's so much harder, it's slower, it's more expensive, and it's less reliable.

So can you do it? Absolutely. Do you have an endless pile of cash to burn through to get there? No? Then maybe, I might be so bold as to say, what is the thing you could sell today so that you do end up with a pile of cash that lets you take bigger risks like that? And that's really the broader scope of 30Beth500 is one product in a universe of content and products and books and courses called Stacking the Bricks.

And that's the core philosophy of Stacking the Bricks is, yeah. Sometimes the business that you want to build is not actually the business you can build yet. You have to lay the first brick in order to build the whole wall, let alone the whole castle, right? So to build an empire, you start one brick at a time.

And sometimes that means building something That is not the dream business. That's okay. And I'd argue it's actually pretty valuable lesson to go through for folks to realize, Oh, if I can build a business that is not my dream business, but it generates revenue with some degree of consistency and lets me build the foundation for the business that I do want to build, then I get to choose.

Do I leave that business behind? It's an option. Or do I let it keep doing its thing while I now have reclaimed my time, my energy, my resources and control to start taking bigger risks on things that might be slower to generate revenue, might not generate revenue at all. A big part of my career is I take my free time that I've freed up through my businesses and go, I want to point that at stuff that's not revenue generating because there's stuff in this world that I want to do that.

It would be hard for me to go raise the money to do maybe like a nonprofit or a community based impact thing and go, Oh, it doesn't actually cost money. What it does cost is time. And if I can generate more time for myself I'm going to point that towards those things. So it's just a different way of thinking about the act of creating a business beyond one product.

Carl: you definitely don't yourself, like you've got so many feathers in your cap, like I've, you've got your little book, tiny MBA, which is lots of little bite sized business advice. Can you talk a little bit?

Alex: one of the highlights of the pandemic quarantine was was putting that out into the world and getting such an incredible response. And still to this day, hearing from folks, basically every week that, it's become part of their routine when they're feeling a little stuck or distracted, they crack it open to a page and just see what that page sparks for them.

But yeah to have shipped that book, it was my first physical product. Indie Hall is a physical product in that it is a physical place, but that's very different to have a product that it is in that it is made and when somebody orders it, we ship it to their door and that's done, I've shipped books to literally every continent on the planet, including Antarctica, there's a copy in a library at a research lab at the South Pole.

It's that's, it's just damn cool, man.

Carl: The other thing that you do a lot of is community building. So everything like 35500 has an attached community. Indie hall has an attached community. So what do you think the importance of communities are? And so if your success and building these sorts of businesses,

Alex: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the answer there is for me emotionally being in community is really what keeps me like both grounded and creative. I think being running your own business is really important. And doing anything kind of entrepreneurial is an inherently isolating experience, even when, other entrepreneurs and most people don't know a lot of other entrepreneurs.

And if you're a weirdo like me, who does businesses weird compared to the rest of the world at least the businesses that people talk about in the world I'm not trying to grow a a giant company to IPO, but I'm also not running like a big company. Corner store bodega or a digital agency.

Like I'm running businesses that are strange. I don't always feel like we've got a lot of peers. It is very isolating. And so for me having a sense of community, with Indie Hall, I did not set out to create a workspace or a coworking space. I set out to find my community in Philadelphia.

Who are the other people in the city who wanted to make things and put them on the internet? And I realized it was hard to find those people. This is again, 2006, 2007 pre meetup. com. There was just no good infrastructure for discovering that kind of like mindedness. And you had to go to old school user groups and walk into rooms full of people wearing suits.

And I'm there with, a hoodie and piercings and tattoos. And I just do not feel like I fit in. Where do I find my people? And so Indie Hall was a way for me to reinforce that. To myself and to others that like If you find people like you, even just a couple of them, that's all it takes to start feeling a little more comfortable in your skin, a little more confident in your day.

And so in a lot of ways, like indie hall is a business and is my community, but it's also this thing that kind of keeps me energized and keeps me learning. And I'm constantly meeting people who do things for a living that I did not know you could do for a living. I've been doing this for almost 18 years.

And every week I meet somebody who makes money in a new way. And as someone who's endlessly fascinated with business, I literally have an infinite pipeline of people introducing me to those kinds of things. And that gives me new ideas. And it gives me teaches me new lessons for how people operate in their weird niche silos.

Like we're talking about software businesses, we look like total weirdos to most of the business world. And that's true of from any vantage point. And I love that every version of this canon and often does have community. It just Often it's work to find it. And in some cases, if you can't find it, even if you can find it, there's nothing stopping you from creating it.

So that's number one is very personal, emotional. Like I find myself, I'm a happier person in community, plain and simple. And the other piece to it that I think is more relevant to the business conversation, and this ties things together with sales Safari and, and founders that are trying to figure out what to create for customers is I think community.

Being in community and being whether you're a community member or community leader, the number one skill that Indie Hall has taught me is listening and the wide range of versions of listening and what to do with what you hear. And Whether it is making people feel heard so that they trust you as the leader to make a small decision or a big decision that affects potentially lots of people, or in the case of business, making people feel heard so that they trust you as the best source for whatever it is that they're shopping for, whether that is a service to solve their problem, a product to solve their problem or anything in between.

I think the skill of listening is something that you cannot practice on your own by sheer nature of what it is. And while one on one listening is a very valuable skill set in and of itself, I think listening in community is a very different one because you're not just listening for individual Voices, you're listening for broader patterns and you're synthesizing what you hear and then reflecting back that synthesis and I've been told, and I do not say this to brag.

I've been told from a bunch of members from Indy Hall, especially during times of crisis that my communication back to the community is some of the best they've ever seen. And what I always tell them and say, Hey, I worked really hard at it, but B. When I say work really hard at what I'm really doing is I have a lot of conversations in community so I can try and get in the heads of all the different kinds of people and get a real sense of how they're experiencing.

The moment again, whether it's good or bad. And then the writing that tends to resonate is writing that makes people feel like, Oh, he thought of me before we even had a chance to have a conversation. And whether it's crisis communication or really good sales copy. It's the same thing, right? Good sales copy.

You're reading, going, how did, are you like reading over my shoulder? Do you know what's going on in my world? And ultimately this all comes down to variations of that cycle of knowing where and how to listen, how to synthesize that down and then reflect it back to the right person so that they go, Oh shit, that is what I was thinking.

And in fact, maybe you said it better than I've been able to articulate it on my own. And I don't think you can do that. Without being in, in community and not just present, but actually participating in community,

Carl: Do you think it's valuable for people or especially SaaS owners and business owners to, is it more important for them to participate in an existing community? Or is it valuable for them to start creating their own communities around their product and with their audience?

Alex: I generally advise against creating a new community, someone who has created many that may sound ridiculous. It's. A whole additional job that most people just massively do not are not prepared for. Never mind whether or not you'd be good at it. It's just, it's an incredible amount of work. So I would consider like building a community somewhere between a later stage and a last resort.

Right when you've exhausted all the other options. Now there's one other major liability of building your own community is you end up with an echo chamber and people, one of the truths of communities, is they tend to be pretty self selecting and depending on I think one of the. A good communities to survey is, or I would say A is more than one community.

This is what you're looking for is diversity, right? Monocultural communities are inherently limiting in what you can learn from them. And more specifically, if those people are coming to that community because of you, now we're back to an environment where it's a little more like a zoo. It's opt in.

And again, it's not bad. It's just not as good. And it's a lot more work. So that's why I usually put it in the category of treat this as a last resort. And I'll end with one more thought, which is I find that the people who get the best results from building their own community. To a degree, do it somewhere between unwillingly and accidentally.

People who build communities specifically towards an end, whether it's filling up a workspace or doing customer research, like the number of times brands have built communities and it's basically, it's become a really expensive Thing to moderate and manage and they end up shutting it down and those people scattered to the winds.

Anyway, I think it's because people are building community for the wrong reasons. And. Again my vantage point here is, with my bias on my sleeve, I've run into you all for almost 20 years and spent most of my life studying communities and watching them start and collapse. And I think some of the most vibrant ones, it's not that people set out, we need to build a community is not the words that come out of their mouth.

It's man, I. I'm feeling lonely and isolated. Let me see if I can go find some friends and gather somewhere and then eventually decide it'd be nice to have some more friends. Let's see who we can invite. And it grows organically over time. So I don't know. I feel like sometimes people think I'll build a community and it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel, forgetting that fish in a barrel is not a watering hole.

It's fish in a barrel

Carl: Yeah.

Do you have any advice cause you've seen a lot of businesses, hopefully 15 years of basically managing business based communities. Do you have any advice for founders and people who want to become business owners? In

Alex: Oh boy.

Carl: think, what do you let's put what do you, let's find the most important thing outside of picking an audience, picking someone to serve.

Alex: Yeah. The first thing that comes to mind is, I think there's a lot of a lot has been said about, and we talk about this on various stacking the bridge products. Do you have, you gotta be tough, you gotta be resilient, you gotta, hustle and work really hard and work all these hours.

And that's, to be clear, I work hard. I work at stuff I like to do, but, and sometimes I have to work on stuff I don't like to do. I don't know. This is roundabout way of saying I think if you're not someone who is inherently disciplined, that outsourcing discipline doesn't generally create discipline.

So people look for accountability groups. And I've never seen strong output. Out of an accountability group. What I have seen strong output out of is working with a coach, a management coach. And there's a lot, there's a lot of, and to be clear, there's a lot of like bullshit coaches out there that are selling, I'm not saying work with a business coach, crystal clear.

That is not what I'm suggesting. As someone who has done some of that myself, what I am saying is if you find your problem to be showing up to do the work, when you say, this is a thing that I actually want to do, that is a management problem and you're in a situation where. You are presumably good at doing work when there is somebody else deciding what gets done and when and what the priorities are, but you also know that somebody else deciding sucks.

Now, if you decide you don't want to have a boss, you still need a boss. You need to be the boss to yourself. And I see tons of folks, work when they feel like it work when it only, when it feels good work, when they're inspired and they don't actually you. Have the skills and frankly, I'm not expecting most people to have the skills to manage themselves without some guidance and training.

I think that's a missing piece of something Amy and I've talked a bit about what, we've approached things from a more from the productivity bend. And there's a little bit of self management in Things like, she wrote a book called Just Fucking Ship, and there's definitely self management stuff in there.

But if you've struggled to finish things that you start a business is a big thing to start. A, read Just Fucking Ship. It's just fucking ship. com. It's 19 bucks. It's worth every penny. But also, consider investing in a management coach and be upfront with them and say, look, I'm not actually managing other people.

I'm trying to learn good management skills to better manage myself. And it may take trying a few folks to find somebody that works for you. But I Start a thing and then spend more time in their head than in the business or even worse than in their customers.

Carl: There's definitely some truth in like just being there and just actively being present in your business and working on it. Is probably the most important thing,

Alex: Yeah. And I hate to oversimplify it down to discipline because I feel like that puts us back in this territory around like hard work and grind and all this, and I just don't believe in, but I do think, maybe another way to frame it is I see a lot of founders aspirational and people who are actually making money just maybe not enough to survive or let alone thrive where I look at how they work.

And I go, if you behaved the way you do in your own business at a job, what would your boss do? And the answer is unequivocally, Oh, I'd be fired. And my, you look, when you hear that out loud, you're like, Oh, I'm being a bad employee of my own company. And maybe your goal is not to be an employee of your company.

That's great. You still need to show up and do some work in order to build a business that is at a point where it needs less and less of you. But folks want to jump straight to the end without building the foundation. And, uh, and yeah are maybe the worst boss they've ever had or are the worst employee they've ever been without those guidance, the guidance and skills needed to manage your own work day.

Carl: I definitely think that again, time and time spent, like the, I think the most frustrating part is just how long a lot of this process takes. So everyone happy to be happy to put into work for a week or a month and work really hard, burn themselves out. But it's like, it takes a lot longer for business to really get

Alex: especially when we're talking about SAS businesses. And I think our we talk about this in, in, in 30 above 100 and stacking the bricks, we are not anti SAS. I think some people think that we are because of some of the material we put out, including one of our best known essays is why you should create a tiny product first and it really boils down to people see a lot of our students create things like info products and.

A, the fact that SAS people look down at info products when info products routinely make mountains of money is its own bias that should be investigated. But that's a, that's for you to do with your therapist. I think the more important piece here is to, is not, it's SAS is harder, it's harder to sell and it's slower.

Anything subscription is slower and subscription software tends to be the slowest because you're not only abdicating the sales process to your landing page, assuming you did a good job with the landing page. Now you're abdicating the handholding process that basically every client wants and needs, whether they say they want or need it to really good onboarding, some emails, in many cases, nothing at all.

So somebody, you maybe got them to sign up. But now how do you get them to actually use the thing? How do you get them to use the thing to the point where they feel successful enough at using it, that they want to keep using it, let alone keep paying for it. And that those are like outsourcing. Both of those things is hard and takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of risk.

And to your point, it takes a lot of time. Among the patterns that we see here is, people will quit a job. Or maybe they get some severance given the layoff climate that we're in right now, and they're like, sweet, I've got a year that should be plenty of time and they're thinking time to build the software, not time to build trust with an audience who wants to buy, not time to get those customers not only ready to buy, having bought, but then using the product, sticking with it.

That includes time to. Have enough successes that you can get some testimonials that are not really generic. I love this sass, like who cares? And the, depending on your own psychology, I've seen a lot of folks see their bank accounts tick down and that start to drive them to rush, make bad decisions.

Both. Any number of other things that are ultimately variations of self sabotage. So unless you know for sure that a dwindling bank account will not push you into self sabotage I generally recommend against that and instead Acknowledging this is going to take a while, how can I continually generate enough revenue through other means, whether it is a, I get a job that pays me enough to live, but does not require a lot of brain power, or maybe doesn't require, 80 hours a week, whatever it is, like massively underrated thing, people will say really tired at the end of my day and I'm like it's because you got a job that requires you to think a lot.

What if you got a job that maybe doesn't pay as much, but also doesn't require you to think as much right now, you're not only giving up a little bit of money, but you're gaining back your brain power, if not your time. The number of folks that have taken us up on that yeah. that advice of building something on the side, whether it's on the side of a full time job, on the side of a service based business, consulting or otherwise, it's a relatively small percentage of people that actually try it, but everyone who, almost everyone who tries it has had really good results.

So I think it's just, it's a path less traveled but a good one to consider when you're looking at the different ways to get to the end of the game.

Carl: Awesome. So much for coming today. Alex, it's been great chatting. So just quickly, is there anywhere that people can experience 3500 without having to pay the full course?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Actually we created a program that we call launch for the win. That's launchftw. com. And it is a lightweight version of 35 500. It doesn't include all of the like heavy. Practice around things like sales Safari, although we point to it as a thing that you can do with some really lightweight basics in the material.

So it is, it gives you a multi page PDF roadmap that really helps you do the first thing, which is break down your big financial goal into smaller pieces. So let's say you want to make 10 grand at lunch at launch. How many products, how many sales do you need to make at different price points in order to add up to 10 K?

Most people have never done that math. So we'll take you through it from the start. And then working backwards what kinds of products could you make that hit those price points? What do you need to know about the customers? Where can you go and find them and things like that? And even a schedule over the course of 12 weeks for executing on all of the beats of that roadmap.

So you can follow it to the letter. Some don't. You can do it on your own schedule, whatever you like. But the other piece to Launch for the Win that we launched last year that I'm really proud of is an email course that follows along with the roadmap, gives a little more detail and in depth explanation and gives some interactive exercises.

So it'll actually take you through the questions that you need to ask yourself and answer in order to complete that sort of step of the roadmap. And when you hit submit, It'll send you that back to yourself. So you have it recorded. But it also sends it to us and occasionally we respond. So if you do take that that course and you decide to submit some of the workbooks, know that Amy and I are actually reading those.

We don't respond to every single one. We try to read the vast majority of them. It's super useful research for us to see what people are doing and also see people, see how people. Interpret the exercises differently than we intended is another great part of the feedback loop, but in all cases whenever there's an opportunity for us to say, Hey, here's a little bit of guidance or here's some encouragement.

Hey, you did a really good job on that. You should take that and run with it. You'll get that back from us from time to time. So I'd love to see some of your listeners submitting your workbook answers, and I'd love a chance to give a shot back.

Carl: So that was launchf2w. com. You can also see Alex's writings at stackinthebricks. com. He's got indyhall. com. And of course, if you want to buy tiny MBA, I believe it's available on Amazon.

Alex: It is not on Amazon. It's at tiny. mba. Yeah

Carl: got it from Amazon.

Alex: oh, did you buy it right when we launched?

Carl: did actually. That's

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. So we, we had a, and this is, when you run your own business, you get to make decisions. We launched the ebook on Amazon and had some major issues with Kindle and had some of the worst customers I'm technically a customer, but they weren't treating me like a customer.

They were treating me like an adversary. And I said, you know what? Screw this. I'm not selling it on Amazon. And we've sold entirely on our own platform since about a week after the book launched. 

Carl: Too quick.

Alex: yeah you got in there early. I appreciate that. But yeah, you can get the print copy shipped to your door.

Or an ebook, or if you buy the print copy, you also get the ebook right away while you're waiting for the print copy to show up at your doorstep. Everything there is at tiny. mba.

Carl: Awesome. Thanks again for coming. I've really enjoyed this conversation. And everyone else see you all next week.